Rick Santorum’s latest OMG moment: Obama a “snob” about college ed

No need for much commentary here. Let’s just let the man speak for himself. GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum opposes the president’s push to help everyone get a higher education. (By the way, Santorum thinks someone who wants to be an auto mechanic doesn’t need postsecondary training, apparently believing that vocational colleges aren’t colleges.)

Inside Higher Ed has a good article, and here’s the most telling passage:

While Santorum’s implication is that President Obama wants everyone to have a college education like his (a liberal arts degree followed by a law school, attending elite institutions), most of the Obama push for expanded higher education has been about community colleges and job-training programs. He has spoken far more about the need to give working class people tools to advance their careers (through certificate and associate degree programs) than he has about four-year liberal arts degrees.

On Sunday, Santorum stood by his comments about higher education not being needed by many Americans. On ABC’s “This Week,” he said that ”there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college. To sort of lay out there that somehow this is — this is — should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work” of “people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college.”

Talking Points Memo, a liberal news site, on Saturday reported that Santorum — in his unsuccessful re-election campaign to the Senate in 2006 — seemed to endorse higher education policies remarkably similar to those of President Obama today. The site found a copy of Santorum’s campaign website from that year, which said: “In addition to Rick’s support of ensuring that primary and secondary schools in Pennsylvania are equipped for success, he is equally committed to ensuring [that] every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education. Rick Santorum has supported legislative solutions that provide loans, grants, and tax incentives to make higher education more accessible and affordable.”